


It's a New Day, It's a New Dawn

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 00:59:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16713511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: Post cancer arc, Mulder and Scully go on a date.





	It's a New Day, It's a New Dawn

She’s been having dreams. Vivid, cinematic. Bright kaleidoscopic photography. It’s an irony that her skin is parchment-pale and her eyes are gray-ringed and she fights the urge daily to disappear herself in the comforting wrap of her charcoal fleece.

She doesn’t smile too often yet. She still finds that hard, despite her positive prognosis, despite being dealt a second hand in life. Maybe living with death changes muscle memory. She doesn’t smile for many reasons, like her mother’s almost oppressive love and her brother’s tight surprise at her recovery. But sometimes her lips twitch at the relief Mulder’s hides in his own easier smile, the protracted looks he hangs on her when he thinks she isn’t paying attention, the more frequent night-time phone calls – that come much earlier now. Honestly, she misses their 2am slot. They spoke more freely then, shared fears among the ideas, dropped old stories into the mix of autopsy results and wild theories. She knows he’s been frightened to his core by her cancer. And, like the child that still lives in his soul, he doesn’t quite know how to shuck off that terror.

Remission. It’s a strange term. Sending back, releasing, abating, waiving a debt. Like she owed somebody something. If she has rejected death’s shackles, then it goes that she must be free. She must be able to do as she pleases. She remembers reading about the first sexual revolution – in the Roaring Twenties when the heavy burden of war had lifted and the novelty of life and living powered up. Jazz clubs, movies, cars. The world changed profoundly for that generation. And there’s something about the curious and colorful hope in her dreams that makes her feel the same way.

Last night’s dream lingers under her skin, behind her eyes, in her breathing. Magical, sensual, sexual. She can’t pin it down but it made her feel good and she wants to hold on to that feeling. She stretches her toes out under the soft linen and enjoys the warm weight of it molding to her body. During her treatment she couldn’t bear anything against her skin, even the lightest touch scratched at her skin, burnt, bruised, scarred. Now she craves it.

She’s always been tenacious, clinging to noble principles or boyfriends past their use-by or scientific proof despite what she’s seen. She has gripped life by dagger-like horns and held on, palms bloody and torn. This time she has won and she needs to celebrate. She bought herself new underwear and pyjamas in the most luxurious silk, and she booked herself in for a day treatment at the local spa hoping to shed the last of her dying cells and front this new life of hers with fresh, unblemished skin.

___

Mulder drops by. He’s no good at lying, gives himself away with too many stumbling starts and glances to the left. He rubs his nose and she stares boldly at him, this glorious man in front of her holding out daffodils, the flowers of new life and hope. He’s asking her to dinner and she wants to believe it’s because he feels the same things she does, but she knows it’s really because he needs to see that she’s eating.

“My shout,” he says and there’s a vague air of desperation as he taps his wallet in his pocket.

The restaurant is bland. Mulder is the bright spot with his embroidered reminiscences and luminous smile. He’s genuinely delighted to be entertaining her. He can’t help trying too hard. This man who has lost everything and still believes in fairy tales and happy ever afters. The truth. Mulder’s truth has always been about a bigger picture, a higher purpose. The mundanity of dying just wasn’t in his vision.

“I’m not keeping you up too late?” he asks, checking his watch for the fourth time. It’s only just gone nine and she feels extraordinarily awake.

“I’m fine, Mulder. I’m having a nice time,” she says but knows it’s not enough for him. His mind will be worrying through all the things he has said or hasn’t said or should say. She covers his jiggling fingers with her hand, his sharp intake of breath punctuating the moment. “I want to say thank you for believing. For having faith and for your courage. I know how hard it must have been for you to see me that way. I don’t think I’ve told you how grateful I am.”

His fingers still and his shoulders fall forward a little. He turns his head to the street. There’s nothing to see out the window but the rain falling into orange spools of light cast by the lamps, but his attention is captured by it. It seems he is all out of stories. “There was no choice,” he says, monotone matching the outlook. He does lift her hand and close it inside both his palms, and it feels like he’s covering her heart.

She has a sudden urge to dance. To drink incandescent cocktails in a shady club. Wear feathers round her neck and Charleston until dawn. She wonders if Mulder has ever danced, although she dimly recalls a story about his mother teaching him to waltz as a pre-requisite life-skill, alongside swimming and cooking. Teena and Bill Mulder’s priorities in life were never quite synchronized. Genteel living on the Vineyard or trading your daughter to a syndicate of power-hungry men? 

“Have you ever been to a jazz club, Mulder?”

He releases her hand along with an unguarded laugh. “What?”

“A jazz club, you know? Dancing, drinking, cigarettes in black holders, pearls and boas.”

He’s still chuckling, all teeth and chesty laugh. “I do have a fedora and some two-tone Oxfords in the closet somewhere.”

She sees him then, gray hat shadowing his face, pinstripe shirt with gold cufflinks, suspenders holding up his cuffed pants, black and white polished shoes skitting across the floorboards. Something inside her blooms. She smiles and the stretch across her face feels like an new act in her life.

“You look good as you are,” she says, trying not to linger on his broad chest.

“Thank you,” he says, drawing out the words with uncertainty. Then he sits upright, runs a hand through his floppy bangs and grins. “You’re serious? You really want to dance?”

Suddenly unsure, she rubs her thighs and swallows. She’s being irrational, she knows. She’s taking a chance, she knows. She’s putting herself out there, she knows. He’s not ready for this shed-skin Scully, this rebirthed version. “It’s okay,” she says, shaking her head. “Let’s get the check.”

Outside, the air is damp and the residual smell of frying onions hangs all around. She’s noticed the slow return of her sense of smell and the aromas of life come at her with memories. A chilli-dog with mustard spooling down her shirt. Smoke from campfires with grit between her toes. Cologne on pillows. Ocean-fresh skin. The salt-sweet stickiness of the morning after.

___

Mulder cranes his neck back round, slows the car and turns it around. He looks across at her and holds her in a half-smile. She sees the neon sign, a golden pineapple with oversized verdigris spikes, flashing. The Tropica.

Inside, it’s velvet-walled dark. It’s tactile. It’s pink smoke puffs and aqua light strips around ceiling high mirrors. The bartender is dancing shiny cocktail shakers in each hand. The low thrum from the speakers is pulsing some saxophone standard and Mulder pulls his credit card from his wallet and sets up a tab. It feels illicit, ensconced in a booth sipping strawberry daiquiris through green straws. After the first, she tucks the cerise cocktail umbrella behind her ear and makes Mulder grin. After the second, she tucks the umbrella behind his ear and makes him laugh.

When her cancer struck fear into her bones in the early hours, when she saw nothing but a void in her future, when she trembled at the thought of Mulder going mad with bottled-up grief, she imagined how she would spend her last days on earth, had she been well enough. It wasn’t a midnight tryst in an underground club sharing lurid drinks and even more lurid tales about work colleagues. Somehow, she’d imagined pink sand and sun-baked skin, glimmering yachts and dolphin-diving. Fresh, salt-whipped winds snapping shade-sails overhead and mango juice sticking to her chin.

But this, this electric thrall that presses around her, the gravity of life. It’s more than she could imagine. His fingers cover hers and he’s tapping with the beat of the drum. On the small stage, a woman in a purple sequin gown shimmies and belts out Nina Simone. He leans across, tipping over the glass in front of him, spilling pink ice onto the table. He ignores it and his jaw brushes her cheek as he whispers in her ear.

“Would you do me the honor of dancing with me, Dana?”

Hearing her name on his lips shoots heat through her veins. She is Dana tonight. She has worked off her debts, gripped life by the shoulders and shaken herself back into it. She is free. And when he presses his damp-shirted chest to hers nesting his face in the crook of her neck, it’s like she has stepped into one of her dreams.

She never wants to wake.


End file.
